Adoption math

Trust me, I spend as little time as possible thinking about math equations. Today, though, I’ve had math on my mind. Maybe it’s because I’ve been interviewing a lot of scientists lately, and some of their smarts might be rubbing off on me (that’s scientifically proven, right?). Either that, or the guy from the Harvard-MIT genetics lab did a mind meld on me during our phone interview. (He was certainly smart enough.)

Math seems to be the best way for me to make sense of the topic that’s really been front-and-center for me this week: adoption. Yesterday afternoon, I sat across from my daughter in a café, sipping a cup of coffee and thinking about the impenetrable sense of loss she sometimes feels when she reflects on her life. “I was left in an orphanage when I was an infant, and I spent four months there. I don’t have words now for that kind of loss, because I didn’t have words then,” she told me. I nodded, and sipped, and thought. The day she was put in my arms was one of the happiest in my life. For her, it was something altogether different: not entirely happy and not entirely sad. My joy in that moment clouded the forethought to see how my utterly joyful experience was not at all the same experience for her. If I’d been keeping a tally sheet at the coffee shop, there would have been a checkmark in the “loss” column for adoption.

And then this afternoon I was invited to witness a friend’s adoption finalization hearing. On the 15^th floor of a Minneapolis office building, my friend’s image was video-transpor-telemated to a courtroom in Florida. (Okay, so maybe the Harvard guy didn’t really help me all that much). My friend sat surrounded by people who love her, represented by mother, niece and friends, with three adoptive parents and one adopted young man represented. We were holding back sniffles and collectively bearing witness to the great good thing she and Josiah were doing for each other.

Together in that conference room, we were people who made space for fleeting but incredibly significant moment. We stood watch as that heart-meltingly beautiful six-month-old try to scoot across the conference table and eat the phone cords. The judge signed the paperwork, and we burst into tears and applause, probably not a very common sound in that particular conference room. It felt good to put that upbeat vibration, plus a dollop of baby drool, into that starkly serious space. I realized, as I tucked my handkerchief back into my pocket, that I was now tallying a checkmark in the “plus” column for adoption. For today, it was a great good thing that could not be denied, not if you looked for one moment at that mother’s face, or at all the beaming ones of her loving community. It’s been a long time since I felt such a lightness of heart, and certainly never on a Tuesday afternoon in downtown Minneapolis, so that has to count for something in adoption’s favor.

Back at work this afternoon, I am looking out my office window at a Starfire Maple that’s inspiring today, but will be bleakly barren in just a few weeks. The shorts-clad rollerbladers zipping down the big hill outside will be replaced by bundled-up and booted weather warriors. Everything changes. The beloved, dreamed-for child carries a story that began one way, was crossed out, and was started over. Adopted children live edited lives, and some of them find that redirection a very hard burden to bear. Sometimes, all the love in the world isn’t enough to save them from that pain.

But—and here is the secret I wonder if even my Harvard guy is willing to tell himself—sometimes love, just love, is exactly enough for what is needed today. And today was one of those times.

This Writing Life – the Drunkard, the Hook and the BML

I’m a freelance writer, which means I will write anything, including a grocery list, if someone will pay me money to do it. When I am feeling professional and composed, I tell people at networking luncheons that my work “includes a lot of variety.” When I have a glass or five of wine with my girlfriends, I say, darkly, “I never know what’s going to happen next – or not happen,” and because they know me, they know that this is not a good thing. But still, I show up at the keyboard every morning, including most weekends. There is a mortgage, and there is college tuition, so nobody’s asking for your opinion, I tell myself. And then I sit down at my desk and get ready to meet the next deadline, whatever the next deadline is.

Here is how my writing life went last week: on Sunday morning, I got up early and noticed a frantic email message from an agency account person. So I had a conference call with her at 7 a.m. (yes, on the Sabbath), then spent the rest of the day doing research and writing snappy magazine-format copy for a leave-behind for a pitch to a major telco that was going out the door the next evening. On Monday, I talked to three different pediatric neonatologists for a story in a U of M publication about optimizing infant brain health, and because no question a journalist asks can ever be called stupid (to her face), I got to ask the head of the pediatric department what is was that red blood cells are supposed to do, anyway, and he told me all about it without calling me a moron (because he is very polite, not because I’m not).

On Tuesday, I pulled together a big mess o’ “fun facts” for a nonprofit theater company for which I volunteer, because a local magazine had agreed to run a feature on our twentieth-fifth anniversary season. It was fulfilling and time consuming, which might describe whole big chunks of what happened to me last week, except for the parts that were scary and frustrating, which was the rest.

On Wednesday, I interviewed district mangers for one of my customers about a program they have called BAM, which, it turns out, is about customer bulk orders, and has nothing to do with the Flinstones, even though I kept toying with the idea of “BAM BAM!” as a headline. (Really, I was having a hard time stopping myself.) On Thursday, I did more research for my upcoming MN Parent story on how to cope when your child gets a mental health diagnosis, and started ramping up all the sources I needed to contact for a piece on upcoming trends for a meetings and events trade magazine article that will appear this winter.

On Friday, I had an interview for a profile of a woman who is the new President and CEO of the oldest and largest women’s small business assistance center in the country, based in Chicago. Then, at the end of the day, I had an unsettling phone call from a couple who had been sources on the mental health story, who decided that they didn’t want to be quoted after all. It involved shouty talk on their part, the kind I hate. When I finally hung up, I realized that I needed to write an email to my editor about the situation, so I got that done. But still, I wanted to cry, especially since one of the chief reasons it’s good not to work in an office is that my coworkers aren’t around enough to make me cry (just my family, but that’s another story).

And then, just as I was thinking that surely, surely, I could stop for the day, I saw an email from a friend, whose subject line indicated the need for a favor. It was a writing favor, I knew, before I even read the message, because that’s the only favor anyone ever asks me to do. The other things I can do really well besides writing – worrying, going to bed early, reading too many books, worrying some more – don’t tend to be things for which people really require extra assistance.

Writing is one of those things that people think just naturally happens, until they have to do it themselves. I’ve had friends who try to gloss over the enormity of what they’re asking me to do by saying, “it’s already practically written,” or using phrases like “wordsmithing” or “polishing up.” I hate that. I’m not a polisher, I’m not a smith, and if the thing were actually already practically written, you wouldn’t be coming to me. This friend, though, was honest. She knows that I don’t have a Disney-princess cageful of writing pixies to unleash on my projects, and that putting all those nouns and verbs together in an actual working order does tax my increasingly diminishing brainpower to a significant degree.

Still, she really needed help. She’s single, she wants a kid, she’s been investigating adoption, and she’s at the point in the process where she has to write what is called a BML, or Birth Mother Letter. (Too bad, I mused, thinking about what I’d written on Wednesday, that it’s not called a BAM, or I’d already have a great headline.)

I am, myself, an adoptive mom, but my little girl was sitting in an orphanage in Wuhan, China, when we started to create the paperwork mountain that made her part of our family. The Chinese government was not interested in Birth Mother Letters, which are essentially chatty, cheery “pick me” acts of desperation that make online dating profiles seem like the height of authenticity. The Chinese government wanted Proof of Income and Guaranteed Payment in American Dollars, and that was pretty much as far as it went. (Later, after Emma had come home, they added restrictions to the effect that the adoptive parents’ combined ages couldn’t be over 100, and that they couldn’t be morbidly obese, but back in 1995 China, things were pretty much wide open for the ancient, the fat, and the generally infirm, as long as they were toting the correct number of greenbacks.)

In 2013 Minnesota, I discovered, not so much. There are rules, a lot of rules, and they are clearly rules written by women who went into social work because teaching first grade wouldn’t give them enough opportunity to boss people around. My friend attached a five-page set of instructions she’d been given on how to create this letter. I’ve answered enough RFPs in my life that I am usually just fine with reading a long list of requirements on what I’m about to write, so I scanned through the directives. The horror quickly mounted, as did the exclamation points: Three-dimensional decorations, like ribbons, it turned out, are strictly forbidden, but be sure to show your creativity! (All I could think was – ribbons? Who would ever do that?) Everyone in all your pictures must be smiling! But there can be no pictures of you in your wedding dress because -- um, well, you know, seemed to be the general gist on that one.

Then I read this gem [punctuation theirs]: “If your letter has a winter theme, be sure to change it in March to a summer theme! The opposite is not true; a summer themed letter is still appealing in winter!”

Did they conduct focus groups with birth moms to find out which seasonal clip-art was most appealing, I wondered? I felt so terrible that my friend had been forced to subject herself to the sort of people who clearly saw the adoption process as a good opportunity to slip in some of the wisdom they’d picked up in those marketing classes back in community college. In 1988.

No topic was too small not to be the subject of the written equivalent of a shaken finger-in-the-face. After pointing out in an underlined directive on page four to “Run spell check on your computer each time you’ve made changes,” the instruction-giver switched things up by repeating the Exact Same Information, but this time reaching for the big formatting guns – italics plus multiple exclamation points. This accounts for page five’s perky admonition: “Reminder: spell check your letter!!” Was there no formatting mish-mash to which this person would not stoop?

I began to get a picture of what my friend had been going through, because I just knew that someone had made her sit in a badly lit conference room this letter was read aloud, slowly. I knew this because someone who would write this many instructions would really enjoy adding to the torture by reading them aloud to a captive audience. I could picture myself in my friend's situation, only I’d be sitting in the back row, doodling on my paper and not paying attention, then livening things up with some smartass remark like, “So, Ms. Halvorson, how do you feel about spell check? Do you think it’s something we ought to consider doing And where do you stand on exclamation points, by the way?” 

It was clear that no one would ever let me adopt a baby these days, not with my sassy mouth. But I had what my friend needed to possibly reach her baby goal, so I got to work with the notes she provided and starting writing a letter. I began, as I usually do, with some research, checking out the other prospective parents on the agency’s web site. Happy. Very, very, very happy people. Lots of cheeks pressed together, as if there had been tragic superglue accidents just moments before the flash went off. The three most common words in the introductions were “Suburban,” “Married” and “Christian,” not that I have anything against Suburban Married Christians, or Christian Married Suburbs, but I saw what my Urban Single pal was up against.

I took a long walk and thought about her, and how much I admire her and and enjoy her company, and what a good mom she would be. Then I went to bed. I got up at dawn and started writing. I tried to think about the person who would be reading these letters. I doubted that she would care very much about the hobbies that the prospective parents enjoyed, which seemed to be a big part of every letter. Really? Kayaking and jigsaw puzzles -- hopefully not at the same time, right Kayla and Chip? (Not their real names!  Just the most Christian ones I could think of at the moment.) Desperate for a place to start, I tried to remember the last time I had read a stack of applications for anything, and that was when we had interviewed for a nanny 15 ½ years ago this very month. It was hard to keep track of all those forms from the nanny agency, not only because every single girl’s name ended in “i,” but because they all just seemed so drearily similar. One of the questions was about alcohol use, and each of  the girls wrote something to the effect of, "I never let demon rum touch my lips." Only Leah wrote (and I still remember her phrasing):  "I like a beer now and then."

It set her apart. It made her seem refreshing and truly authentic. When we were arranging the interviews with all the “i” girls, my husband kept saying, "When is the drunkard coming? I want to meet her." Saying she liked a beer now and then was Leah’s “hook.” It was the only thing that made her stand out from a sea of sameness. Granted, Kayla and Chip (not their real names!) would have been horrified by her, but we liked her. And then, of course, we loved her, and still do, but that's another story.

I tried very hard to strike the same tone in my friend’s letter – real-for-true, not Happy Happy Happy. I mentioned a homemade gift she had made for a kid she’s close to – at the time I saw it, it embodied for me the kind of person she is – supportive and silly and so full of love for that child, who is supremely blessed to have her in his life. In my letter, I described the gift and its significance. For the mom in me, it was a heartwarming moment. For the writer in me, it was my drunkard hook, the thing that would make my friend stand out.

It must have worked, because when I reread my draft of the letter, I cried, and heck, I had written it. My friend said she cried too. Now we just have to get some scared and pregnant teenager to cry when she reads it, and we’re home free.

Who can say what will happen? This whole business sounds like a total crapshoot. But maybe there will be one Birth Mom who is getting really sick of Kayla and Chip (not their real names!), and maybe she will read this letter and decide that her baby belongs with someone real. And maybe someday, like about nine months from now, I will run into my friend, carrying a squalling baby in one those ridiculous front-loader carriers, and she will look exhausted, and happy, and complete.

And I will think, words did that. Words helped her get there.

And I will be very, very happy.

Somewhere in Wuhan (And the Part I Left Out)

Emma in Wuhan, 1995

“I wasn’t going to tell you that,” he said, and it seemed he already wished he could take back his words. We were sitting on the lumpy brown chairs in one corner of our Wuhan hotel room, whispering together while Emma napped on the double bed, surrounded by pillows to keep her from going anywhere.

The minute he had said it, I had jumped to my feet and raced over to check on her, my daughter of 24 hours. Her lucky bindi, carefully painted with red nail polish by her foster mother, had been washed away, but her shiny red manicure was still in place. She slept with a frown on her face and her hands up in the air, a posture she would maintain for the next 17 years, each time she lost her nightly battle with sleep. Along with so much else, though, I didn’t know that then.

But there was one thing, the thing he’d just told me, that I wished I could un-know, right away, because now there was an image in my mind that I couldn’t wipe away. He’d just come from a final meeting with the orphanage officials, and I could tell from the moment he stepped into the room that something troubling had happened.

“They found her when she was two days old,” he’d reported, looking away. “At the radio parts factory.”

A two-day-old baby. In February. At the radio parts factory.

But not just any baby.

This baby. This one that I’d already given four bottles to, already changed a few diapers for, already bathed, nervously, in the hotel sink.

My daughter.

When people talk about their children, they use the word “love,” but that’s a concept that, for me, always contained too much an element of choice. We decide whom to love. With Emma, there had been no deciding.

From the moment I had embarked on this adventure, had clipped my hook to the bungee cord of a crazy idea to adopt a child from China, it was as if a magnet had been placed deep within me. The minute she was placed in my arms at the Wuhan Foundling Hospital, our opposite poles had attracted, inevitably. We were attached, and it was just that simple and just that complicated, even after only 24 hours.

So the thought of her ever being alone, being cold or being in danger --  the thought of her anywhere near something that sounded as menacing as a radio parts factory – made me feel rent in two and impelled me to sprint to her bedside, just to make sure she was still safe. She was safe. She was Emma, and nothing as simple as mere abandonment as an infant was going to get in the way of her rocket ride. But of course, that was one of those things I didn’t know yet.

“We don’t need to talk about that part, ever again,” he said.

And, for seventeen years, we didn’t. On her birthday each year, I would brightly bring up reminders of  her birth parents, a topic in which she always seemed disinterested. I had friends with kids from China who demanded daily and detailed recollections of what had happened to them. Emma, the ruling Queen of Emma-land, seemed to be a country of one, content with her own present and unconcerned about the past. Still, I always looked for a way to mention her parents and tell her how proud they would be of her. We would toast them, thank them, say that even halfway around the world, they were thinking about her. Behind my eyes, though, there was always the Dickensian-dark backstory and that looming hulk of the radio parts factory.

I knew from recent studies that most kids adopted from China shared a similar story – a poor family who had one girl already, who had tried for a boy and who, with the birth of this daughter, had failed. Often, I’d read, there was an iron-willed mother-in-law involved, one who commanded what had to be done. Like most things in China, it was all more complex than it seemed. What looked like an abandonment was often an arrangement with a sympathetic friend who agreed to “find” the girl and get her to an orphanage. If she had to be left somewhere, hidden watchers were stationed to ensure her safety. It’s one of the immutable rules of China, I suppose, that someone is always watching. She was loved and she was safe, I tried to tell myself, but, on so many February twenty-seconds, after the frosting had been licked off the candles and the wrapping paper had been burned in the fireplace, that thought did not hold much comfort.

And just at the point of the story where I might be forgiven for this repeated omission, I have another one to confess. Emma has been living in China this academic year. She decided to return to her hometown in the spring, to visit her orphanage. She asked for my help in arranging the journey. I was asked to gather up all the papers we’d been given in Wuhan. I found them in the family safety deposit box. Her Chinese visa. Her medical exam. The first photo I’d ever seen of her, sent via fax machine. Another photo we’d had to take at the American embassy in Guangzhou, when she had turned angrily from the camera and I’d had to turn her face back toward it. My fingers are the only part of me in the photograph, but I swear, I can tell they’re nervous fingers.

I took the papers home and begin to scan each page. It occurred to me, somewhere during this task, that I should send these documents to Emma, too. I thought she’d be delighted to discover that she didn’t need the English translation sheet, but could read the original Chinese. Then I came across a document that mentioned where she was found. I suddenly felt like a character in a James Bond movie: “So, radio parts factory, we meet again.”

Emma on the flight out of Wuhan, 1995

I sent all the documents to the agency. I sat for a long time in front of the computer, deciding which ones to send to Emma. I imagined her, alone, in her bedroom, in Beijing, reading all of this. I pictured her quick eyes scanning the sheets, taking it all in. I imagined how she would feel when she got to that one, how her eyebrows would crumple together, and how she would reach to chew on the shreds of the baby blanket she brought with her from home (it's visible, whole, peeking out of the red bag in the picture above).

I sent her every document but that one.

Sometimes it takes years for us to realize the mistakes we’ve made as parents -- the things we should have done, the things we shouldn’t have said. As I sat at the computer that day, I knew it was wrong to withhold this document, but I couldn't bring myself to unleash the truth upon her while she was all alone in that complicated and chaotic place.

The truth comes out though, sooner or later, every time. The arrangements were made, the permissions were received, and Emma and her father spent yesterday at the Wuhan Foundling Hospital. The guide we’d hired, armed with the information I had sent, included a visit to the radio parts factory in the itinerary.

Somewhere in Wuhan, Emma has relatives. Somewhere in Wuhan, I know she wishes, she has a mother and a father and a brother and sister. But somewhere in Wuhan, she was released from their family circle, and that somewhere was the radio parts factory. She was with someone who loved her when the truth she was seeking came crashing in on her. I can only hope that helped.

As I’m writing this, I haven’t yet heard a report from the travelers, haven’t pieced together what sense Emma is making of this journey. But that’s beside the point for this record of my omissions and my failures. We can each of us only tell our own stories, so I am telling mine. It’s not a very proud one, but, finally, it’s honest.

At some point in everyone’s life, adopted or not, there is a time to reflect on family. How on earth, we think, did I end up with these people? While some may point to destiny, biology or just random chance, I do admit that I believe in a higher power. My version may be a little bit offbeat (I’ve written in another blog about how I’m convinced that God will resemble Cole Porter, and that heaven will include nightly showings of all my favorite plays), but I’ve also discovered that I believe in a corollary Cocktail Party theory of families. God, the great jester, throws us together in these lifelong cocktail parties with people he thinks will make amusing or instructive company for us. While I realize that the guest list can seem sometimes to be vengeful, or obtuse, or just plain wrong-headed, I have great hopes that, someday, it will all be clear why we ended up in the same unending party with those particular family members.

So, the way my theory  goes, my girls are stuck at the same cocktail party as I am, and while I’ve spent a great deal of time these past seventeen years getting them carrot sticks and offering them coloring books and trying to keep them amused, I have some hopes that in the years to come they might occasionally offer to freshen my drink, or bring me a rumaki, or, if I ever make good on my continued threat to take up smoking, light my cigarette for me.

For whatever reason, Emma is at this party with me as her mother, and that’s going to be something she has to make her own sort of sense of, along with everything else the poor kid is trying to figure out these days. She has been the great adventure of my life, but I understand that the relationship holds something different for each of us. She is in my bloodstream, something so elemental to my existence that I can’t imagine living without her. I am her launching pad, nothing more and nothing less, the thing she pushes against to help her slip into orbit. And even as she's flashing against the sky, I still feel the pull of her and know that, somehow, we'll always be connected.

Putting My Mat Next to Hers: The Mother and Daughter Yoga Mala

I celebrated the summer solstice by completing a yoga mala, a practice named for the string of prayer beads used in many Eastern traditions. The mala, usually practiced during solstices or the New Year, consists of 108 sun salutations, one for each of the beads on the string.

One. Hundred. And. Eight.

It took me a few days to write this blog this because I couldn’t lift my hands to reach the keyboard until today. Also, all my meals have been eaten over the sink, since I’m declining to make that long reach for plates on a shelf that’s suddenly too high for my whimpering biceps.

But really, I’m fine.

The best part of the practice was that my 15-year-old daughter, Emma, did it with me. I was conducting my usual mombabble the night before: I’mdoingthemala tomorrow BLAH BLAH BLAH [insert the sound of Charlie Brown adults here], when I heard myself saying that the mala was good luck for the season ahead, and that many people said it was yoga magic. Turns out I had her at “good luck.” She was dressed and ready to go at 6 a.m. the next day, a gloriously sleep-in-able summer morning. I wondered if she were the only teen awake at that hour in the entire Twin Cities.

We arrived at the yoga studio. It’s a sacred place for me, a location that has offered safety, wisdom and great leaps of growth over the years. I love Tarana the way ten-year-olds still fiercely love their threadbare stuffed animals of babyhood. Emma’s impression? Not so much. Its pumpkin patch sincerity was lost on her, and she blasted off a series of fish eye signals, quickly letting me know that this joint was too smelly, too hot and entirely too full of saggy, lumpy grownups. I closed my eyes, made a mudra and thought about how the Buddha never had teenagers.

The instructor suggested that we form a circle shape. She called it a mandala, but I knew it from kindergarten days as “a big cherry pie.” She talked about how this shape was conducive to mutual support, allowing us to draw upon the energy of our neighbors during the practice.

That’s when I knew I’d be able to complete every last one of those one oh eight salutes, because my mat was next to the world’s single greatest renewable energy source, Emma Bao Wei.

We got started. One sun salutation. Two sun salutations. I thought about how someone needed to write the yoga equivalent of Ninety Nine Bottles of Beer On The Wall for malas.

I tried very hard to Stay on My Mat during the practice, and not get all Mommyish on her when she sat one out in child’s pose. But I felt her; oh man, did I feel her. There is no way to be close to Emma and not know she’s there.

Fifty sun salutations. Fifty one sun salutations.

She was still generating power. Her energy pummels me into submission on a regular basis, but today I was using it to push my ancient keister over the finish line. She dragged me along with her, as I’m sure she feels she’s been doing for quite some time now.

One hundred and seven salutations. One hundred and eight sun salutations. If the instructor had said, “Let’s do one more for good luck,” the class would have risen up and rolled her in her own yoga mat. We were done.

I looked over at Emma. She raised an ironic eyebrow and wiped her beautiful brow. She, as always, was ready for more.

Today, June 26, is the fifteenth anniversary of the day Emma was first placed in my arms. It was another hot, stuffy and magic-filled room, just 6,950 miles away from the yoga studio where we finished our mala together. I remember how light she was when I held her. And how heavy. For someone who had the weight and volume of a loaf of Wonder Bread, she also seemed to contain quite of few of Mr. Whitman’s multitudes, perhaps several more than the average person.

I remember looking in her eyes. I thought it was me who was was assessing her, but I realize now that she was also completing a good once-over. The look I got back from those dark, dark eyes was steady and strong. “This chick isn’t much,” it said, “but I think I can make it work.” She’s been doing her best these past fifteen years, dragging me along toward the places she knows she wants to go, pushing me over the finish line by dint of her endless power and unfailing tenacity.

I knew I loved her from the first moment I held her. And the more I’ve gotten to know her, the more I’ve realized that she will always be essentially un-holdable. This is a person who will power the world someday, and I’m just lucky enough to have had my mat next to hers for these past fifteen years.

I love you, Emma. Happy Adoption Day.